Software Quality Matters Blog

As a former Quality Center user I am not surprised at the high level of frustration with its poor functionality particularly reporting, customisations and integrations. Things have moved on and in the 21st century there is a modern alternative.

Nor am I surprised that some unenlightened users are content with QC/ALM’s limited offering.

2017 was the year HP themselves moved on from QC/ALM through their disposal of this business to the British company, Micro Focus. These venerable products have only evolved slowly but they have been re-branded many times and you may know them as Quality Center, Test Director and QTP.

Many companies have struggled with HP’s code-centric approach to test automation and UFT/QTP is typically either on a shelf or absorbs a disproportionate amount of effort to keep it working as their applications were enhanced.

Last month I was in Denmark at a leading European carpet manufacturer to train and consult on Qualify, our application quality management solution and TestDrive, our 100% code-free test automation product.

Their business systems are a mix of Infor M3 heavily customised to provide integrations with multiple legacy systems. This presented no problem as both Qualify and TestDrive are technology neutral and can run over almost any application whether client based or in the cloud.

Manual testing is intrinsically flawed, primarily because one test cycle is almost never enough. Manual testing is performed by humans and humans have a finite capacity for repetition. When an application is first delivered, the test team will commence their efforts, but after a while will reach a point in their use cases where they can go no further until the bugs discovered to date have been rectified.

Application software has always contained bugs and will continue to contain bugs for as long as developers exist. So, from the moment that the first application program was run by Tom Kilburn on 21st June 1948 (to calculate the highest factor of a large binary number) the necessity to test developed programs to ensure they work as required has been accepted. So, for almost 70 years a significant piece of human endeavor has been testing and some of it has been fundamental to some of humanity’s greatest achievements.

This is probably not the perfect analogy, because at some point you will have to stop and change the tyre. But it may be if you don’t do it quickly, there will be a much nastier outcome and expense.

However, looking at the things that can bring benefit with minimal effort, it is possible to make progressive incremental changes which buy you time from the outset and start you on the journey to greater savings. If the majority of your testing is currently manual, then adopting in the first instance technology that makes this less manual (less effort) is an easy and quick win

If something important on your car needs fixing, you do it. You don’t really have a choice because you need your car. It’s the same with your ERP platform, but often senior management don’t look at the details of how you do it, the internal cost of doing it or the fact that the process might be less than ideal with unnecessary risk of failure. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any car maintenance and whilst it might be a lot cheaper for me to do somethings the risk is too great.

Persuading senior management to invest in technology to improve, reduce cost and de-risk should be easy, but in reality, it often takes a good deal of selling.